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India’s Mangalyaan Mars probe has successfully completed its first orbital engine burn.

India’s Mangalyaan Mars probe has successfully completed its first orbital engine burn.

Not only was the burn successful, it demonstrated that the probe’s thrusters work as planned, which means it is almost certainly not going to be stranded in Earth orbit and will at least get to Mars.

Genesis cover

On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.

 
The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.


The audiobook is also available at all these vendors, and is also free with a 30-day trial membership to Audible.
 

"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News

2 comments

  • Edward

    From the article: “Even so, some commentators have questioned whether India should be spending its millions on a planetary mission when a significant part of its population are in poverty and figures for childhood malnutrition are some of the highest in the world.”

    At what point should India, or any other country, put resources into research? Should they wait until all problems have been solved? Who knows when such research will find an unexpected answer to a current problem?

    We once solved a lot of health problems when research into optics led to the invention of the microscope and the discovery of germs. Let’s remember to spread out our resources to solve multiple problems and to keep basic research alive for the discovery of the surprising answers.

    Further, the US has spent trillions of dollars, in the past five years, on poverty, but we still have plenty of it — more now than five years ago. Sometimes what seems to be the correct answer is not.

  • Edward, most of the technological advances including in medicine come from either military or space expenditures. We spend so little on space exploration these days, it strains credulity to say India or any other power should spend less to fund poverty problems at the expense of space exploration. It’s not a zero sum game.

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